“This image, captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — otherwise known as M31.This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image.”
via Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy | ESA/Hubble.
I had to download the 4.3 GB file. For science.
Much as the sonorous tones of a cello arise from the vibrations of the instrument’s strings, the collection of nature’s particles would arise from the vibrations of the tiny filaments described by string theory. The long list of disparate particles that had been revealed over a century of experiments would be recast as harmonious “notes” comprising nature’s score.
via Why String Theory Still Offers Hope We Can Unify Physics | Smithsonian.
The Sun is directly overhead of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere during the December Solstice.
The December Solstice occurs when the Sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees. In other words, when the North Pole is tilted furthest – 23.5 degrees – away from the Sun.
At 6:03 PM EST last night, our geographic location was the furthermost position away from the sun that it will be until next December. I was lucky enough to be singing Christmas carols with my wife, our girls, and members of our faith community at Emmanuel Baptist Fellowship.
Solstice has long been a sacred day for those of us in the northern hemisphere and marks the “extreme of winter” or Donghzi in Chinese. It happens to coincide with major times of festivals in modern and ancient religions on purpose, as we continue to come to grips with our humanity while wrestling with concepts of existence, death, and faith in times of darkness.
Here’s to the lengthening of days and the spreading of candelight to remind us of the angels of our better natures as our mother planet makes yet another orbit around her own parental star. We are a young and curious species, indeed.
I was excited to see Interstellar last weekend. I’ve always been impressed with Director Christopher Nolan’s movies and the artistic vision he has brought to everything from Batman to Inception.
It’s hard to write a full review of something as expansive as Interstellar, especially since I’m not a film critic and there are a number of supposed plot twists, surprises, and a “big reveal” at the end that I’m guessing was supposed to move viewers in a Sixth Sense manner. Accordingly, this will be a short review.
Overall, I was disappointed.
The music score was beautiful, the sound (Merianna and I saw the film in its intended IMAX experience) was deafening but very well done and effective. There were grumblings from early reviewers that the awesome (I use that word in its intended case) sound of the movie drowned out dialogue in key parts. Nolan later revealed that was intended. I would argue that’s probably a good thing because the dialogue we are left with is trite and oozes with sappiness that a movie of this intended grandeur should not include. The exception was Murph as a young girl, who was fantastic. The special effects were incredible and definitely kept you engrossed despite all the plot holes (some as big as a black hole) and inconsistencies of actual science as applied in the movie.
Yet, the movie kept trying to be something bigger than it was. It was reaching to be the 2001: A Space Odyssey of our generation. It fails to do that.
Perhaps my disappointment in the movie is my own fault because I love “hard science” sci fi and I’ve seen 2001 too many times. For a casual movie goer who wasn’t a science teacher, it’s probably incredibly moving and scientifically “awesome!”.
I’ve tried to like the movie all week in my head. As a final attempt, Merianna and I watched 2001 last night because of my grumblings about how similar Interstellar tried to be to that classic. 2001 holds up well, in my opinion and is much more of an expansive, intimate, and anxiety causing experience (about our own humanity, about our place in the cosmos, about the still small voices in our head etc). Compared to 2001 and the oblique absence of dialogue or emotions from the humans (HAL 9000 is the most emotive character), Interstellar is closer to Armageddon (I’m sorry).
What really let me down the most about Interstellar besides the cheesy dialogue, the utter ridiculousness of attempting to make love some sort of quasi-scientific force akin to gravity or electromagnetism, the plot leaps (why is the rocket facility that close to the farm??… I could go on and on but don’t want to spoil anything) was the ending. I won’t reveal anything, but it’s terrible.
The first 20 and last 20 minutes of 2001 are dialogue free. There’s only music. It’s moving, strange, and engrossing. Interstellar attempts something similar and when Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) has a similar experience to Dave (from 2001) at the end of the movie, I was impressed. Interstellar reaches its moving crescendo and leaves room to breathe emotionally, visually, and even a little philosophically. I was sure the movie was done and started mentally preparing to try to find our way out in the crowded theater. But Interstellar didn’t end. It kept going. And it sucked for those last 20 painful minutes.
It’s a fun movie. But it could have been so much better had Nolan left room for the audience to explore themselves. For all of its celebration of humanity as a species of explorers, Nolan treats the audience like a group of primates protecting a watering hole on an African savanna rather than an advanced life form. Too many banal chalkboards, whiteboards, sappy conversations, and drippy conversations for me to elevate this movie to where I’d hoped it would be.
Fun read…
A look into the deep, dark, strangely complicated world of Simpsons mathematics.
They estimate that somewhere between 30% and 50% of the water in Earth’s oceans must be older than the Sun.
via Earth Has Water Older than the Sun – Scientific American.
Almost missed it…
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Latin for “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, often referred to as simply the Principia, is a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, in Latin, first published 5 July 1687
via Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Thanks to Steven for passing this on…
Amazing that we are still discovering important aspects of our solar system that totally change how we look at our cosmic neighborhood.
Watching the new Cosmos on Fox (Newton episode) and really miss being an 8th grade science teacher now.
That humans have confirmed the Higgs boson and much of the underpinnings of the inflationary nature of the universe shortly after the Big Bang (gravity waves!) in the last two years (not to mention other advances in biological, psychological and sociological sciences) in a time of scientific budget cuts and anti-scientific thinking in our country gives me great hope for our species in this still young century.
We’re explorers, and these understandings of the universe around us leads us to greater deeds here on earth with the right guidance. Or to put it another selfish way, every dollar we put into science leads to many many more in return.
While we are capable of disastrous and terrible actions, we’re also capable of learning from our past and correcting our path as a species. Here’s to our better natures in this incredible time of human exploration…
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.
If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
via Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang – NYTimes.com.
Chilling to see the results of Chernobyl still working themselves out in the natural world…
“Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and lead author of the study. “It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground.”
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly: Smithsonian Magazine
Merianna and I were watching House of Cards Season 2 and I happened to be sitting on the floor playing with the pups when I remarked “was that an earthquake??”
Turns out… yep.
Whatever you’re doing right now, stop it.
And go look (watch) this amazing production:
Code is on GitHub.
I never get tired of reading articles pondering whether our universe is a computer simulation / hologram.
Now we just need the Ancient Aliens guy to explain how trans-dimensional mice created the original computer to figure out the question with the answer of 42…
As cosmic particles fly through the universe, they lose energy and change direction and spread out across a spectrum of energy values. There’s a known limit to how much energy those particles have, though, and Beane and his colleagues have calculated that this seemingly arbitrary cliff in the spectrum is consistent with the kind of boundary that you’d find if there was an underlying lattice governing the limits of a simulator. It should also, if present, scatter the particles in a certain way as they come up against it, and we should be able to investigate whether that’s the case.
via Cosmic rays offer clue our universe could be a computer simulation Wired UK.
Here’s your Monday afternoon mind-bender…
It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.
via Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe? : Nature News & Comment.
Vint Cerf writes a great post about how the modern-day internet (no, not Facebook and Twitter and TMZ.com) came to be during a tumultuous switchover in 1983:
Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet | Official Google Blog: “In an attempt to solve this, Robert Kahn and I developed a new computer communication protocol designed specifically to support connection among different packet-switched networks. We called it TCP, short for ‘Transmission Control Protocol,’ and in 1974 we published a paper about it in IEEE Transactions on Communications: ‘A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.’ Later, to better handle the transmission of real-time data, including voice, we split TCP into two parts, one of which we called ‘Internet Protocol,’ or IP for short. The two protocols combined were nicknamed TCP/IP.”
One of my favorite pages on Wikipedia (and yes, our planet is going to get real interesting in a few hundred thousand years):
Timeline of the far future – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Due to its northward movement along the San Andreas Fault, the Californian coast begins to be subducted into the Aleutian Trench. Africa will have collided with Eurasia, closing the Mediterranean Basin and creating a mountain range similar to the Himalayas.”
My 7th grade students frequently ask me how humanity will do with the sun going supernova and all in about 5 billion years. I remind them we’ve got bigger problems much much sooner than that (climate change, rising sea levels, gamma ray bursts, meteorite strikes etc).
Carl Sagan was, as usual, spot on about our pale blue dot. So let’s do the best we can with the time/space we have, while we can.
via Kottke.org
The name of my next band…
Benjamin Franklin – Wikipedia: “Whilst in London, Franklin became involved in radical politics. He was a member of the Club of Honest Whigs, alongside thinkers such as Richard Price, the minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church who ignited the Revolution Controversy.”
Geez I love Ben Franklin.
Where is Carl Sagan when we need him?
Are Those Spidery Black Things On Mars Dangerous? (Maybe) : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR: “‘If you were there,’ says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, ‘you’d be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air.’ The ground below would be rumbling. You’d feel it in your space boots.”
Wow, what a pic…
Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Neil Armstrong: “Neal Stephenson and I were not standing in order to make it quite clear who Neil #1 was and would always be.”
That pretty much sums up my life as a fanboy.
Not because it was easy, but because it was hard…
I hope we go back someday for the same reasons.
crescit cum commercio civitas?
Arctic ice cap set for record-breaking summer melt session | Ars Technica: “While predictions of a total melt during the summer months and its potentially devastating effects on the planet have many worried (Serreze says the rapid melting may have contributed to severe storms in the US in recent years), commercial enterprises are busily jumping at the opportunity to open shop in the Northern Passage. China sent its first vessel along the Arctic route in August, trimming its usual route length by 40 percent, while Germany and Russia are already established players.”
